1989 revisited

Annikki and I, along with my professor, visited India on a trip that took us to Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and then Delhi, where we took part in a conference on Physics of Semiconductor Devices.

As I told my friends in New Delhi this year, when we checked in at this conference, I entered our residential address in New Delhi as the MRF Guest House in Sunder Nagar. When the lady at the registration desk saw that, and asked my relationship to MRF, she quickly called a couple of the organisers. They refused to take our registration fees.

Reason: They were so proud of the way my late cousin Ravi Mammen, and his team of professionals, Ratnam, Krish Veerapan, Balan, and co., had organised the Cricket World Cup, which had brought great fame and fortune to India as a whole!

I sent my professor home after the conference while Annikki and I decided to visit the Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh. (After that, we had to spend Christmas Day at Nagpur airport, just reaching Mumbai for our 30th year class of 59 reunion at the Wilingdon Club.)

We started our holiday at Nagpur (Maharashtra), in the very centre of India, from where we hired a car and drove to Kanha, stopping at an interesting forest hotel on the way. It was December 19th when we arrived at Kanha. A freezing drive in the forest in an open jeep took the toll on Anniiki. So, we decided, in future, to use our covered car for the trips into the sanctuary.

On the very next day we saw two tigers, one walking straight along the road to our car. An unbelievable experience. The second encounter was a sort of put up job of a tiger and her cubs who were being held in place by a steady stream of visitors on elephant back.

We returned to our quite deserted hotel. I had my small portable radio on which I could pick up BBC World service.

The next morning we woke up to the news of the overthrow of the Romanian Preident Ceausescu.



That to me, as Polymerist (a word coined by me in 1988 describing a chemist/physicist and technologist specialising in Polymers) was quite a personal experience.

The Finnish establishment had been sycophantic supporters of the Ceausescu regime to the extent of even publishing a translation of a book "authored" by Elena Ceausescu: "Polymer Chemistry and Technology Developments".

Considering that Elena was a third grade chemist and she was named as the first author of all the 39 publications in this translation, showed how sick some people in Finland (and Romania) were.

They had a similar practice in some universities in Finland.

My explosive book "Seven Years Hard Labour in a Finnish Holiday Camp - A Finnish University" published in 1994 and the most pirated book in Finland that year, took the lid off the scam in my University. To a large extent, students in Oulu, as an indirect result of my writings and the subsequent investigation, got back their power of owning their research results and writings.

Yesterday, as the world celebrated the demise of the Ceausescu regime, to relive those days 20 years on, just as we return again from India to Finland, was quite a moving feeling for me!